A Year in Reading: Jacob Lambert

Andre Agassi’s 2009 memoir, Open, wasn’t necessarily the best book I read this year — Joshua Ferris’The Unnamed would probably claim that title — but it was the most memorable, partly for the wrong reason.

For close to 400 pages, Agassi tells of his harrowing childhood, his hatred of tennis, his dreary marriage to Brooke Shields, and his devotion to his trainer, Gil Reyes, and his current wife, Steffi Graf. His matches and insecurities are detailed in a roiling, visceral style, and Open chugs along as if Agassi’s true peers are Hamill and Halberstam, not Sampras and Courier. There are flaws here, to be sure, but they have more to do with Agassi himself than his authorial potency. As I read, I kept flipping to the title page in search of a ghostwriting credit. There was none, and I was flabbergasted. In addition to being a legendary athlete, Agassi was also a hugely talented writer. Some guys have all the luck.

When I finished, though, I found the truth in the Acknowledgments: “This book would not exist without my friend J.R. Moehringer,” Agassi writes. This is an understatement: Moehringer — Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of The Tender Bar — pretty much wrote it himself. Though Agassi writes that Moehringer “felt … that only one name belonged on the cover,” I felt utterly rabbit-punched. It was the only book I’ve ever read that betrayed me in such a way — like finding that your cousin’s hilarious web video was directed by Adam McKay.

After reading Jay Bahadur’s nonfiction book The Pirates of Somalia, and Janet Reitman’s scary (also nonfiction) book Inside Scientology, I happened to read Haruki Murakami’s newest novel, 1Q84, on assignment. The book has flaws. It’s too long; it can be repetitive; at a certain point you can see that Murakami is simply delaying his various plot developments. The characters often consist of Murakami’s ideas about them. They are slow to come to life, like composite monsters on laboratory tables waiting for lightning to hit them and to bring them awake. And the plot is straight out of The Magic Flute or The Master and Margarita: two people are redeemed and transformed by their love for each other, and they manage to make their way through a landscape of unreality peopled by demons.

And yet, and yet. Murakami’s novel creates a world ruled by cults, and I felt that I was being given a 932 page primer in 1Q84 that helped to explain what I had already read in The Pirates of Somalia and Inside Scientology. We are talking about a way of transforming reality by methodologies that demand a certain kind of rigidly enforced vision and adherence to certain kinds of authority figures in societies suffering massive structural breakdowns. The psychology required by that sort of vision is very much on display in 1Q84. Furthermore, the book is generous in the way that Philip Roth is generous: you get the feeling that everything that Murakami has thought, and felt, and experienced, is out there on the page. Nothing gets held back, not even the ugliness — especially the ugliness. The characters aren’t quite real, but who cares? It’s the kind of risky ambitious storytelling that writers of my generation are often too scared to try. But I’d rather take Murakami’s novel, with all its faults in analyzing an entire society, than a colder and more perfect unambitious novel about another boring family suffering through the death of a grandparent.

Nikil Saval is an assistant editor at the journal n+1.One of the notable events in recent literary history was a modest bump in the number of novels about white-collar work. The two most heralded were, significantly, debuts: Joshua Ferris’Then We Came to the End and Ed Park’sPersonal Days. Both young authors, possessed of little experience besides what their cubicle daydreaming and job insecurity had supplied, they exploited the potential of office spaces to their extreme, and the immediate response these novels elicited from reviewers was: “more!” We needed more novels about bagel brunches, useless meetings, excessive coffee drinking, awkward exchanges, e-mails and layoffs. We were to re-experience what so many of us went through every day, to know it as pain, to see the expression of that pain among others as a form of solidarity.One recent book suggests a different approach to the question of the office novel: Christian Jungersen’sThe Exception, an oblique entry into the genre. Its main characters work at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide (DCIG), where they begin to receive death threats on their e-mail. Death threats turn to grim pranks: the office librarian knocks over a bucketful of blood secreted on her bookshelves. Initially, suspicions fall on a Balkan war criminal residing in Denmark, whose crimes the researchers have exposed; Jungersen’s twist (one of many in the novel) is to reverse the outward search back into the office, where the already heated interpersonal dynamics curdle into distrust. Jungersen manages these various strands appallingly well with a minimum of artifice (his prose is unadorned, almost to the point of being slack and lackluster). He heightens the sense of entrapment by drastically limiting the perspectives to three principal characters for most of the novel, each of whom is possessed and blinded by a different variety of paranoid reasoning. Even better is Jungersen’s recreation of the longueurs of white-collar existence: the dramatic pacing is deliberately slowed by painstaking evocations of chilly office lunches and competitive meetings. This combination of office life and the generic conventions of a thriller produces a book unlike anything I have read before. At the heart of The Exception is a peculiarly European meditation on the nature of evil, and the banal way that one’s office life can dissipate and create human solidarities, pitting one artificial network against another. In Jungersen’s novel, the office is not a place where you go to work; it is a structure in your head, watching you, directing and corroding your thoughts well after you have left it. I read no better novel this year, and it is one of the best I have read in several years.More from A Year in Reading 2008

2 comments:

I so totally disagree with Mr. Lambert as if you had heard his speech at Andre Agassi’s Tennis Hall of Fame Induction, you would know that the man could and can write. He wrote his book OPEN and certainly sounded like the person I have watched play tennis for 20+ years. His interviews after matches were masterpieces and media enjoyed his comments.

You would know this if you have watched him all these years. He also had a wonderful induction speech for his wife when she was inducted but you would have had to hear them to know he wrote them.

Do not judge people until you really know them first. Andre Agassi wrote his book and JR was there along with him for the years it took to write it. He knew his world all too well and the book was so Andre all the way.

It was a year of piles of books. Piles and piles stacked around my office floor, resting on my nightstand, even perched precariously on the top of the stairway banister. These piles competed and collided in my mind every day. Do I begin the morning reading for work? Reading for pleasure? Sometimes these were the same.

In the category of re-reading, I discovered Mrs. Dalloway anew, and –– if you’ll forgive the analogy –– it was like being prescribed exactly the right SSRI. Interior life! Laid out in all of its intricacy, and yet the product of a turbulent mind. As a writer, it gave me hope for my own turbulent mind. And as I wrote to the Buddhist teacher and writer Jack Kornfield (whose book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, wins my vote for most awesome title) it made me think of Woolf as an accidental Buddhist. Next up on the re-read list was Elizabeth Hardwick’sSleepless Nights. I’ve been pressing this book into students’ hands for years, and finally it is most deservedly back in print. A hybrid of novel and memoir, an extraordinary evocation of pure consciousness, I fear I’ll turn off readers by saying that Sleepless Nights is entirely without plot, but bear with me when I tell you that this doesn’t prevent it from being its own kind of page-turner.

Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being was one of the only books published this year that I was able to rescue from the endless stacks and read purely and simply for pleasure. It’s a daring, exciting novel that defies categorization. Rebecca Lee’sBobcat was a favorite story collection, and I now want to read everything she writes. Chris Belden’s novel Shriver ­­­­­–– an example of a terrific book brought out by a tiny press (Rain Mountain) –– is a send-up of academia and literary pretension, as well as a poignant exploration of writerly insecurity. As a side note, Belden has written a hilarious song all about writerly insecurity, an ode to the author photographer Marion Ettlinger. (“Marion Ettlinger/Won’t you take my picture…”)

This being a year that I was finishing my own book about writing, I also read or re-read a fair number of writing books, and discovered that some of the classics hold up beautifully: Annie Dillard’sThe Writing Life, Anne Lamott’sBird by Bird, of course. As well as Natalie Goldberg’sWriting Down the Bones. A new discovery was Beth Kephart’sHandling the Truth, a must for memoirists.

This year also marked the first time in more than a decade where I lived in the same town as an independent bookstore -- and never before have I been so perfectly happy to make my wallet just a bit lighter these days.

In the spirit of the unreliable narrator, I’m the unreliable end-of-year-wrap-up book recommender. Simply, I’m wildly loyal to whatever the last book I read (and loved) happens to be. Because when a book works for me, it doesn’t actually feel like I “happen” to have read it. It seems to me a plain miracle to have discovered the right book at the right time, just the one I needed for whatever I’m writing about or wrestling with, just the book to address the ideas bouncing around in my noggin. I want to lean over to people on the subway (never a good idea) and say, “Look, here are my notes, my notebooks. Here are the sketches I’ve been working on — now read this book that showed up out of nowhere and plain confirms everything I’ve been dreaming.”

So what I’m about to say can’t be very scientific, but the book I most want to recommend from my 2011 reading is one I’ve only just finished, and that’s Orwell’sDown and Out in Paris and London. I immediately fell in love with its loopy structure, and mapped every spiral (if a looping thing can also spiral) in the margins.

What I could not get over — and it’s the mark of any book that survives the test of time — is the sense of immediacy I felt while turning pages. It’s getting on toward 100 years later, and everything Orwell says reads as deeply current and bitingly accurate — that is, “everything” if you leave out all the parts about the Jews, the Arabs, the Irish, the Italians, the Russians, or, well, anyone who doesn’t look like what Orwell sees in the mirror every morning…but forget those bits, it’s the socioeconomic observations that amaze. Which means, either Orwell was a seer and could read the future, or the same horrible systems remain broken in the same way, near a century on. During these days when protest movements are rising up all over the world to challenge the status quo, I give you one sliver of Orwell’s take on the subject of wealth from 1933.
In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting his living, like other business men, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.More from A Year in Reading 2011